Cal Thomas: California schools are failing families

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: Today is Thursday, October 26th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Paul Butler.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Commentator Cal Thomas on the decline of educational standards in California.

CAL THOMAS, COMMENTATOR: The second-largest school district in the country is suffering from academic afflictions of its own making. While test scores at the high school level show a decline in math proficiency of 24 percent and a decline in reading proficiency of 51 percent, is the district making improvement in these subjects a top priority? Apparently not.

Instead, California legislators passed a new law in September creating a pro-LGBTQ task force in the state. The task force is slated to begin its work “implementing supportive policies and initiatives” for LGBTQ students by July 1 of next year. How this will improve the eventual job prospects for graduates, however, no one is saying, because it doesn’t.

Los Angeles schools are increasingly passing students who don’t even meet grade-level standards. This will have important ramifications for their future. As many as 60 percent of students come from low-income families. It’s hard to argue that the imposition of this woke curriculum will improve their lives.

A report in City Journal offers more insight into these problems. It reads, “California now leads the country in illiteracy.” According to the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, “just 30 percent of California eighth-graders are proficient in reading.”

Not surprisingly, public school enrollment is in decline. Quoting a poll from UC-Berkely’s Institute of Government Studies, City Journal writes, “just 35 percent of state voters gave public schools in their local district a grade of A or B, down from 55 percent in 2011. Twenty-five percent graded their local public schools a D or F, which was up 15 percentage points from 2011.”

The answer is school choice, but parents who wish to send their children to private schools in California don’t have access to school vouchers or tax credits. According to one website, private schools serve ten percent of K-12 students in the state, which matches the national average. Arguably there would be more if taxpayer money followed students to private schools.

It’s not just the failure to teach reading and an emphasis on non-academic and radical cultural subjects that have contributed to education decline in California and around the country. According to The Heritage Foundation, an emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion is also having a negative impact. A Heritage study found “As of August 2023…having a [Chief Diversity Officer or] CDO was associated with much greater learning loss during the pandemic by Black and Hispanic students. School districts with CDOs were significantly more likely to have policies that keep the ‘gender transitioning’ of students secret from parents.”

School choice is spreading throughout the country, in part in reaction to this craziness. Given the left’s dominance in the state, California may be the last place to offer it. That could be a contributing factor to the decision by increasing numbers of parents to leave the state in search of better schools that teach subjects they had to learn during their school days.

In Los Angeles, I’m Cal Thomas.

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